TBH, if shipping to the UK weren't so expensive (us$15 or so) I'd offer to ship you ones you're missing, if any. Unfortunately, it's beyond my means -- America has a LOT of issues, how we treat our poor being one of them, in a big way. (Small example: Mom and I live on her disability check; it's ~us$1k/mo. We do not receive Food Stamps any more, and therefore making ends meet is difficult at best.)

In a previous lifetime (ie before bad stuff happened and we became poor) Mom was an attorney and we traveled to Europe every other summer. I say this a lot: if I could pick one city to live in, it would be London.

Maybe someday. Right now I couldn't afford the trip to the airport._________________

Updated my second post to add an iso that has Textmaker2012 only (does not include the Planmaker or Presentations). It includes sns and xorg, and just has Dillo as the browser to keep things lightweight.
TM2012 is stripped from the Freeoffice2012 package and is able to read docx and also create pdfs if needed. Pretty neat little word processor.

(The bay modules are more modular than Dell wants you to know -- I've a Combo drive from a Thinkpad in this one!)

Shutdown from CD absolutely positively 100% would refuse to in any way generate a save file. So I couldn't install it using the install script...

So I did my first manual install! ("did you know" there's no thread for that in HOWTO??? What the...!) I copied the zdrv and main sfs files over, along with initrd.gz and vmlinuz. Then I rebooted with a Puplite5 CD and installed grub4dos. Then I rebooted with no CD in the drive.

As a note... this particular lovely little pile of dump has a graphics card that doesn't mesh well with Xvesa, and the screen likes to think it's an 800x600 screen when it's a 1024x768 screen. Whoopeedoo, there's a few extra steps here for graphical config --
(1) when the horribly colored desktop first shows up, hit CTRL+ALT+BKSP to get to the prompt.
(2) run xorgwizard. pick the 1024x768x16 resolution.
(3) afterwards, type xwin [ENTER] to get back to graphics. it will come up 800x600 'cause it thinks it's smarter than you (it's not!)
(4) navigate to (and open) the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf -- this is confusing because there's an xorg.conf. with a hard-to-see dot at the end. The one that's higher up in the list is the correct file.
(5) within xorg.conf, there are two sections that need attention. One is called "monitor" and the other "screen". Both will have a mention of the (wrong and ugly) 800x600 resolution. Change it in BOTH to 1024x768.
(6) save file, exit Beaver.
(7) CTRL+ALT+BKSP again.
( nifty trick: [UP_ARROW] then [ENTER]. Or, if you like to type, type xwin [ENTER]

"Phew!" That's it.

BTW, even on this pokey little pile of [...] FreeOffice is pretty snappy. This was unexpected -- I figured it would bog things down unmercifully, but it seems to work pretty dang well.

Haven't tested SNS WiFi config -- have to dig up my Cardbus WiFi card and hope that the driver will work (IIRC it's one of those ones that needs ath5k or something... I've forgotten now exactly what it is). Also... sound still doesn't work on this laptop. xmixer crashes without any errors -- I type xmixer in terminal, and it hesitates for a second and then does a new line with the hashtag prompt on it. Oops! Meanwhile my only sound is a PCBEEP if I get an error message. (The sound problem is a known issue -- I've mentioned it before.)

Overall qualitative score: I'm a happy dude with this -- although there are some issues that still need fixing _________________

To be clear, greengeek -- the strange issues with this Dell's graphics are basically because it's a really old Dell. This is a 1999 machine.

This laptop predates the ATi/nVIDIA market takeover or whatever it was -- it has a 3rd party graphics card by a company called NeoMagic, because back then, there WERE 3rd-party graphics, and Dell wanted something "odd" so that they could charge their customers mega $$$ to fix it when it broke.

I'm not going to out-and-out say that these problems will ONLY happen with this particular line of Dell laptops (the Latitude CP/CPi/CPx series) but I will say that *any* laptop of that vintage is going to have a lot of quirks._________________

Actually I had the same problem with my Tosh TE2100 lappy - I had to manually adjust xorg.conf and followed your howto comments from earlier in goingnuts thread - I had forgotten to write it up. It might be a common issue on other PCs aswell so I'm glad you've clarified the procedure.

I do have a Dell cpt which I've dug out (not used it for about 3 years) so I'm very interested in seeing what it takes to get yours going (then I'm going to copy your setup )

Sounds like you've got yours going without adding in a NeoMagic driver - is that correct? I didn't realise this version of xorg had all it needed.

I was thinking about starting a separate thread for these Dell lappy sound issues- what do you think? Be nice to get a functional lightweight puppy going on these.

EDIT: nope: turns out its a cpi D300XT just like yours. Not sure of the ram size yet. Must have a tinker soon.

The NeoMagic driver is built into this version of Xorg. It selects it automatically.

The trick with any other Puppy on these laptops -- do not do not DO NOT select "NeoMagic" at startup, or Xorg will crash flat on its face. Go for the generic Xorg driver, and let the firstrun wizard do its thing afterwards I rather strongly suspect that this is not a "standard" version of the NeoMagic card (if there is such), but one that Dell tweaked...

By the way, the RAM on these is EDO. Regular PC100/133 won't work -- and although you can get EDO SODIMMs on eBay, they charge insane prices for them. I'd love to put 2x128mb in this thing, and max it out (max RAM is 256mb) but I simply can't afford it Right now it has 2x64mb (128mb total) because that's as good as I can do.

The sound issue is a driver conflict -- IIRC the wrong driver is loaded, but I never was able to transplant the correct one from p412. Someone needs to compile the driver needed specifically for pUPnGO. Of course I've forgotten what the name of the driver is... also, pUPnGO doesn't really have a devx -- IIRC goingnuts started making one but never finished.

@goingnuts: what happens if I try to use a p412 devx? (I assume it won't work at all...)_________________

I've had some display problems booting pupngo2012 on certain machines (unrelated to a need for xorg) and have had some success with rearranging the display functions. I'm calling this derivative "TLCpngo12" as the critical display functions are referenced to the "Top Left Corner" instead of having the menu and drive icons sitting in an artificially calculated bottom_of_screen position.
Thread here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=683684#683684

Have now added a combo sns/xorg/qtbrowser/freeoffice version of pupngo2012. See page 1 post 4.
(includes mp text editor to overcome the strange problem of beaver not being able to cop/paste between some programs)

@greengeek -- bravo on the new pUPnGO2012+ version (as I'm calling them now, lol) -- looking forward to trying it out on The Infernal Dell. Downloading now... should go well unless Mom notices a slowdown and reboots the router... hopefully that won't happen

Probably what I'll do is install the Opera pet that goingnuts gave me, along with the other stuff in the more recent posts in the pUPnGO2012 thread.

goingnuts, if you could post that fixed beaver pet somewhere, that'd be great, I'll put that in as well -- or really anything that's not CLI-based. Geany or Bluefish would be REALLY snazzy (but probably too big for this). Maybe there's a text editor that does something similar in a tiny space? Really what I miss is the programmer friendly stuff, oddly enough -- I can edit JWM "xml" a little better when it's in color _________________

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